Wagtail is a new django-based CMS. It attracted quite
some interest, especially as it doesn’t look like your typical django admin
interface.

“Why another django CMS?” Well, the main diffentiator is that they’re
against flexibility.

You can give the editor the possibility to customize everything. This also
means they can mess absolutely everything up.

The other way is to have structured content. This level of control still
gives a lot of flexibility when configuring the site, but it does make
sure your site remains clean. This is the style that wagtail uses.

The network link conditioner is a simple tool for mac OSX that lets you change
your good network connection to a less nice one like “lossy 3G network” or
“horrid network at the django conference”. Good for checking your site’s
behaviour in real-world situations.

You can customize the settings, like % of packages dropped and lag time and
DNS issues.

You can get it via Apples development network. Look under “hardware IO tools
for xcode”.

Don’t forget to switch it off after you’ve used it. You won’t be the first
that tries debugging his suddenly-bad connection...

Responsive and adaptive design is all about getting your site to work on
multiple screen sizes and about limiting the amount of data you send to mobile
devices.

They work for usatoday, one of the biggest sites in the USA. It is a django
site. They use quite detailed device recognition. They don’t just make a
mobile site and a regular site, but they even differentiate between low-end
and high-end smartphones.

All for optimizing the performance on every device.

They try to do a lot on the server. CSS media queries themselves already cost
quite some power on phones. Better to do the differentiation in the django
templates!

Sketching is not drawing. Sketching is a tool, it serves a purpose. Drawing is
an art. So “I cannot draw” is no problem.

Sketching is for your visual ideas what drafts are for your writing. If you
don’t get your visual ideas out of one half of your brain and onto paper
and back into your other brain half via your eyes, you’re only using half your
brain for this kind of task!

You need something that is cheap, fast and ugly. If it isn’t ugly, it doesn’t
communicate that it isn’t ready yet.

Sketch first, prototype later. Sketch first, later on you can spend more time
on usability. Start out with low resolution sketches.

You need:

Paper. Not some electronic device.

Pen. Especially a big fat one.

A wall. Put it on the wall and you can discuss it and make connections to
other sketches you already put there. It helps your brain!